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Monday, February 20, 2012

Do you need VMware ESX? (vSphere)

Update:1 – corrected some numbers. Thanks @jasonboche

Let me just say I love VMware, particularly ESX and have worked with it from before GSX was in shorts, back in the workstation days, when only para-virtualisation existed. I have rolled out ESX 2/3/4 farms (no 5 yet)… I have never had a purple screen of death, I have never had to rollback a workload to hardware, I have VMed Exchange 2k/2k3/2k7, DCs 2k-2k8r2, file & print, SQL servers, Citrix servers they all run great on ESX/ESXi.

But do you need it? Or are you after a solution has all the features, are you after the Rolls Royce? What are you really trying to do? Are you exotic or somehow special?

You want ESXi that's fine, go ahead I don't get paid either way, but then nor does anyone so please do.

Lets just think about what server virtualisation does (as of todays date):

Feature

ESX/ESXi

Hyper-V

XENserver

Bare-metal architecture

Yes

No, but core

Yes

VMotion like

Yes

Yes

Yes

Small footprint

Yes

No, but core

Yes-ish

Cluster (pool)

32 nodes

16 nodes

16 nodes

CPU virtualisation

Yes

Yes

Yes

RAM Support Host

2TB

1TB

1TB

RAM support VM

1TB

64GB

128GB

RAM overcommit

Yes

Yes

Yes

NIC teaming

Yes

No*/vendors

Yes

VM RAM Page sharing

Yes

No

No

Ballooning

Yes

Yes

Yes

Capacity prioritisation

Yes

Yes-ish

Yes-ish

Traffic Shaping

Yes

No

No

Virtual NIC

Yes

Yes

Yes

Virtual switches

Yes

Yes

Yes

VLAN tagging

Yes

Yes

Yes

Dynamic volume resizing

Yes

Yes

Yes

Raw device mapping

Yes

Yes

Yes

LUN management

Yes

Yes-via vendors

Yes-add on

Guest Windows

Yes

Yes

Yes

Guest Linux

Yes

Yes-limited

Yes-good

Guest Other

Great

OK

Good

Paravirtualisation

None (good!)

Yes, LAN/Disk

yes-ish

Distributed Power Mgnt

Yes

Some

Some

Wake-on LAN

Yes

No

No

There are hundreds more features such as “Boot from SAN” which are specific or particular so I have not listed them above, if YOU need them they are critical but lets just focus back on the 99%

So to look at this list above there are some clear areas where ESXi wins out, specifically on the very large scale, telco scale, intensive power saving, dare I say cloud providers… But if you are one of the people who just need a bunch of VMs per server for general workloads any of the three products above is going to work fine. Scale up the CPU, RAM, Network cards and you can go to higher density?

The limits are disappearing.

So now lets look back at yourself, do you really need ESX? Maybe you could save some money… Look around.